enjoy, save perhaps in dreams or delirium.




The old order changeth and giveth place to the new. Among the
women's clubs and in the women's colleges, I have no doubt, there
is still much debate of the old and silly question: Are platonic
relations possible between the sexes? In other words, is friendship
possible without sex? Many a woman of the new order dismisses
the problem with another question: Why without sex? With
the decay of the ancient concept of women as property there must
come inevitably a reconsideration of the whole sex question, and out
of that reconsideration there must come a revision of the mediaeval
penalties which now punish the slightest frivolity in the female. The
notion that honour in women is exclusively a physical matter, that a
single aberrance may convert a woman of the highest merits into a
woman of none at all, that the sole valuable thing a woman can
bring to marriage is virginity--this notion is so preposterous that no
intelligent person, male or female, actually cherishes it. It survives
as one of the hollow conventions of Christianity; nay, of the
levantine barbarism that preceded Christianity. As women throw
off the other conventions which now bind them they will throw off
this one, too, and so their virtue, grounded upon fastidiousness and
self-respect instead of upon mere fear and conformity, will become
afar more laudable thing than it ever can be under the present
system. And for its absence, if they see fit to dispose of it, they will
no more apologize. than a man apologizes today.